Land investors who send direct mail, how many deals do you complete compared to the number of direct mail pieces you send?

For land investors who pull tax delinquent lists from the county (or DataTree or AgentPro247) and send direct mail, what's your average number of deals to number of mailers ratio? 1:100? 1:500? 1:1000?

2,600 pieces of mail per deal. Not exclusively mailing tax delinquent. Sending offers in a 2 page letter stuffed in an envelope. Targeting properties in the $15k-$50k range.

@ryanD Wow glad you're getting some deals! Where do you pull lists from?

The ‘mailers to deals’ ratio is a very dynamic thing that has a lot to do with your market, your data source, what kind of filtering criteria you’re using (this is probably the biggest issue, really), and what kind of mail piece you’re using, among other things.

For example, I could see close rates as high as 1% using blind offers if I’m working in a market with lots of low-hanging fruit, where property values are predictable and it’s easy to formulate prices county-wide... but if my filtering criteria is much more restrictive and I’m only going after high-end properties in a more competitive area, and if my blind offers are all messed up and poorly researched, then the results will be very different (and not in a good way).

It’s an interesting question to ask, but also important to recognize you often won’t be comparing apples to apples unless you’ve accounted for all the variables (which isn’t always easy to do).

@DanielC Primarily get lists directly from the county's tax roll. Have used AgentPro for counties that don't publish their tax roll online.

@ryanD, are you sending blind offers or neutral letters? In your 2 page, is Page 1 your intro letter and Page 2 your specific order on a PA?

@PaulB I send blind offers. 2 pages. Yep, 1 page intro and the second page is the contract.

I am also curious about the conversion rate, I know every area is different, but in general how many Direct offers do you recommend sending to test an area and/or your offer price? A few Hundred? If no response then adjust?

Also, What mail house do you guys use? I understand Direct mail is an investment, so how do you guys make this as cost efficient as possible?

Any insight would be appreciated, Im in the middle of a campaign and even my response rate is low so I am trying to navigate the direct offer strategy because when I began land investing it was with neutral letters.

@TDLandNLot - there are some different philosophies on this. Some people suggest sending out a small amount per day (like, 30 mailers daily) to get a feel for what's working. This is easy to do if you're using automated software like LandSpeed or Pebble, but much more tedious if you're doing it manually.

Another option is to send out a few hundred (maybe 300 - 500) mailers to the target areas you're looking to test out... enough to be a halfway decent sample of the market, but not a full-blown marketing effort that you'd expect a ton of results from. The upside of this is that you'll get the results back sooner, the downside is that you'll have to commit a little more than just pocket change to get that answer (but even so, it's not a fortune).

There are a ton of mail services out there. I've used ITI Direct Mail and Click2Mail the most, but I've heard good things about Lob and Letterstream as well (and there are many others beyond that).

When your response rate is low, it's almost always because of the list. The message can make a difference too, but if your list isn't filtered well enough to begin with, the message won't be able to save it. In most cases, the property owners just need to be refined a bit more to make sure you're targeting a more motivated crowd (out-of-state or out-of-county owners is one easy way to do this, it'll make your list much smaller, but you should see a higher response rate).

Thank you Seth I appreciate your time and response. Ive been doing it manually trying to at least send 100 offers/ week, getting data from Agent Pro, and sending to out of state owners. I may switch to Data Tree to target out of county owners, because my lists have been 300-400 long excluding LLC's for the out of state. Just wanted to get a general idea on if my expectations were too high or needed to do more! Going to stay consistent and send more mail!

I have tried small mailers (200ish) and the response rate is like 4%. However that is with post cards.

And the website submission offer to close rate is 1 for every 12-15 sent out. Maybe my offers are just cheap though?

I just switched to blind offers and sent 1500 out two weeks ago. I have had about calls so far in the last 3 days, about half hang ups and half angry. The good news is there is response, so we will see if I get a closable property off that mailer. I would be happy to close one or two off a mailer like that.

Of course it depends on the market and the price you are offering.

@jawollbrink Thanks for sharing, I think the reason I am second guessing my self is because I started land investing (extremely part time) with sending out neutral letters. Then sending offers to those that responded. This was in 2019, response and conversion rate was higher than I could handle. Fast forward to the start of this year, my goal was to focus strictly on land and build this business. Through research, (podcasts, blogs).. direct offers seemed the way to go. Did my comparable research prior to making the offers ect.. but my response rate wasn’t even close to what it was before. I also switched to a more competitive market which had something to do with it, But based on your numbers I just need to send more offers out. Let us know how it goes, I’m going to ramp it up and will update as well if I begin to gain traction.

@retipsterseth With regards to out of state owners in "these uncertain times", is it worth mailing to all owners, now that 40MM are unemployed?

@Geoffrey - Just speaking from my experience, the campaigns I've sent to all owners (not limiting it to only the out-of-county ones) haven't performed any better than they have in the past. Granted, it could just be the luck of the draw, or the areas I've sent mail to, but I haven't seen any reason (yet) to believe that everyone has gone into 'panic mode' because of the uncertain times. That could change in the not-too-distant future, but I haven't seen any evidence to suggest it is happening yet.

So I lied,

The 1500 pc blind offer I just sent brought me 8 deals this week. Really just two responses but they both owned multiples they wanted to sell as package deals.

Just keep sending...m

@jawollbrink NICE! Glad to hear it!

846 mailers per deal. I've only been mailing delinquent tax lists. I'm sending out my first non delinquent mailers this week so it'll be interesting to see how much that number goes up.

@Dan that sounds about right for a delinquent tax list.

People can say what they will about what a hassle they are to work with (because they usually are), but the motivation is pretty easy to find amongst that crowd.

I have closed many purchase deal through our loan system and the interest rate is 4% per annual

@Dan for anyone who might be interested, I sent out 2600 post cards and flipped 3 properties. Interestingly enough that's about the same deal rate as for the delinquent lists.